The sheer satisfaction, of being able to put a slash through two zero’s and one seven. Yes, I’m one of those types that like to put a diagonal line through a ‘0’ and a horizontal line through a ‘7’ to help distinguish them for the numbers that they are.

The double-zero is still there of course, but I’m not sure that a squiggly ‘8’ is going to completely compensate. We’ll see.

In the old days of course, the tip was to “Write the last two digits of the year in the first few cheques of your chequebook”, but nowadays … who has a chequebook? I haven’t written a cheque in almost two years now.

This entry was posted a 7pm GMT-5. That’ll be midnight in the UK. I’m off to learn the words for Auld Lang Syne once and for all.

Happy New Year.

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True nerds put diagonal lines through their zero’s (like me) but the 7 thing is just wrong. I remember my maths teacher at school telling some girl off – “Well, you’re not French, so don’t let me see you putting lines in your sevens again”. Quite harsh really, she was only 11!

Happy New Year from your family. I spent it being ill with a virus, but managed to drag myself to the window to see other people having a good time with their fireworks. Crossing 7’s? I don’t see the point as a 7 is a 7, whereas a zero could be a letter O.

You’re right about the 7s, but not the 0s (unless the 0 is int he middle of a sequence of letters and numbers and could be confused with an O). I once crossed a few zeroes to make it obvious what they were, and some people thought I had crossed them out! Idiots, but nevertheless it stopped me.

The seven thing is a habit I got into at university, where we dealt a lot with numbers and it was quite important that each digit was sufficiently different so as to be easily distinguished.

I think it’s similar to the radio telephony convention of pronouncing 5 and 9 as “fife” and “niner” to eliminate any ambiguity.

Just got around to listening to the Review of the Year. Excellent as usual. I’d forgotton some of the events.
The one story which springs to mind that you missed was the run on the Northern Rock bank. When you’ve got queues down the high street, and several BILLION pounds withdrawn from one bank in the space of 3 days you can’t really claim it’s “just” a financial story 😉 The first run on a British bank for 120 years or something. Quite scary at the time.